'Oh.' Joe Powys stood up, feeling confused, and a little cool air through the peeling patch in the left knee of his jeans 'Well, thanks. Thanks, Ben.'
'Don't thank me,' said Ben Corby, who didn't believe in anything you couldn't get into a wallet. 'Just because I don't want you to starve doesn't mean I don't think you're a complete arsehole.'
Ben slept – or tried to – in a spare room about the size of a double coffin. No soothing traffic noise, that was the problem, no police and ambulance sirens en route to somebody else's crisis.
It was very still and very dark. The panes in the little square window were opaque, like slates. There was no noise at all from outside, nothing, no owls, no wind through trees, no branches tapping on the glass. Only the creak from the bed when he turned over.
It would have made no difference.
It would have made no difference if there'd been a force-ten gale blowing or a fox had got into somebody's chicken shed. It would have made no difference if a plane had crashed in the woods.
He'd still have heard it; he'd still have awoken around three in the morning with a chill running up his back, from his arse to his fuzzed-up brain.
No question: there was no sound quite like this for putting the shits up you.
Ben didn't move again until he heard another door open across the passage and Joe Powys's loud whisper. 'Arnold, no. Leave it.'
Ben rolled then from under his duvet, snatched up his bath-robe, staggered to the door, crouching because of the thought of beams, the way you did in the car going under a low bridge even though you knew there was plenty of room.
As he felt his way out to the landing, the ceiling light blinked on in its little pot shade, low-powered, but dazzling at first. The vibrating dots resolved into Joe Powys in his T-shirt and briefs standing very still, a hand on the switch on the wall at the top of the stairs.
Ben, his voice thick, said, 'What's up with him?'
But before Joe Powys could reply, another long, rolling howl began welling from the foot of the stairs, went on and on, spooky as hell. '
'I didn't think dogs did that in real life,' Ben said stupidly.
Powys started to go downstairs into the living room, half-lit from the landing, and Ben followed him because, shit, what if Powys went out of the house and left him here on his own?
They were halfway down when the crash came.
A classic splintering crash of exploding glass. Ben was clutching at Powys's arm, hissing, 'Fucking burglars.' Swivelling his head, looking for a weapon, like he was going to find a poker in a stand at the top of the stairs or a baseball bat hanging from the wall.
The crash seemed to go on and on, with a coda of rolling splinters.
The dog was silent.
'It's over,' Powys said.
Ben stared at him. Couldn't move. Powys padded barefoot down the rest of the stairs. 'Mind the glass,' Ben said weakly.
Half-light from the landing was the best they could hope for. The paraffin lamp converted to electricity had been converted to glass shards and dented tin. It was in the middle of the floor, still rolling.
Ben looked fearfully around the room. Nothing seemed amiss, apart from the lamp. In the grate, the fire was almost burned out, one ashy log glinting like a red foil sweet paper. On the chimney breast over the inglenook, the two pictures, of the old vicar-guy and the woman with ash blonde hair, were perfectly in place.
So quiet now, Ben could hear his own nervy, staccato breaths. Trying to convince himself this was another of Powys's scams. That he'd crept down in the night, maybe balanced the lamp on the very edge of the table.
Joe Powys hadn't said a word. He was standing by the fireplace looking at the two photos, Ben looked too and…
'Oh, fucking hell…' His leg muscles turned to porridge. 'You just did that. Didn't you?'
Powys just looked sad.
Ben went up close. Peered, horrified, at the pictures. And then backed off with his hands out, like he'd opened a door and a blast of winter had hit him full in the chest. He fell back on the sofa, hands on his knees as if glued there 'Tell me they aren't,' he said.
Joe went over to the pictures and carefully turned each one the right way up.
'It's OK. It's happened before. '
Ben said, 'You have to get out of here, Joe.'
'No.' Powys smiled. 'I know where I am with this.'
'Who are they? Those people.'
'The old bloke with the beard is Fay's dad, Canon Peters.'
'Dead?'
'And the woman was called Rachel.''
'Girlfriend? She's dead too?'
'I didn't know her long enough to put a label on it. We keep the pictures up there to remind us. In case we get blase about certain things.'
Ben put his hands over his face, rubbed his eyes. 'Where's the dog?'
'Under the table, on his rug.'
'Maybe he upset the table, knocked the lamp off.'
'Could be,' said Powys.
'No it fucking couldn't.' Ben found himself breathing hard again, closest he could remember ever being to hysteria. 'And, anyway, why was he howling? He often howl like that?'
'Sometimes.'
'Why d'you say, It's over? Just now, on the stairs.'
He still felt too weak to get up from the sofa.
'Hang on,' Powys said. 'What's Arnold got?' He got down on all fours, scrabbled about under the table, and came up with something.
A book. A big, fat, heavy book.
'Now this is new,' he said (nervously? Was that a quiver of nerves under the voice?).
'This never happened before.'
He looked up and Ben followed his gaze to the very top bookshelf under a big, black beam-end to the left of the fireplace. There was just enough light to show up a gap in the middle of the shelf, the other books apparently stiff and firm to either side.
'It fell off,' Ben said. 'It fell on to the lamp.'
'Yeh, looks like it.' Powys's voice was dry and flaky like the ash in the grate. He held out the book for Ben. It was a real doorstop, about three inches thick, probably over a thousand pages.
Ben couldn't prise his hands from his knees to take it.
But he could see the title, in faded gold down the spine, the author's name across it, the surname in big capitals.
POWYS.
And because he knew Joe had never written anything half that long, he figured this must be John Cowper Powys, novelist, mystic, nutter.
The title, in smaller lettering, confirmed it.
A Glastonbury Romance.
Ben was bewildered, spooked almost out of his head. A book, just one big heavy book, flies off the top shelf, a good nine feet across the fucking room, smashes a lamp. Smashes the only source of light.
'What's it mean?'
'I don't know,' Joe Powys said. He put a hand on the mantelpiece (to stop the hand shaking?).
'But it's all harmless, isn't it?' he said.
TWO
As Ben ate his breakfast in Joe's living room, he kept glancing up at the bookshelves, searching out the middle of the top row.
You could read the lettering on the spine easily, at least the part that said
POWYS.
He buttered his toast, edging his chair a few inches to the left.
'Let's talk about John Cowper Powys.'
'Oh,' said Powys. 'Uncle Jack.'
'Uncle Jack? Uncle fucking Jack? You're telling me after all these years that JCP…?'
'Well, I don't know, that's the truth. He had a complicated personal life.'
'You can say that again.'
Ben had lain wide awake and cold for what seemed like hours thinking, on and off, about John Cowper Powys. He'd never actually read A Glastonbury Romance, but he'd read one of the shorter ones (not much credibility for a New Age publisher who'd never read much JCP) and found it actually not that bad for something published half a century ago. Joe being a descendant of the great man was just a possibility they'd hinted at in publicity for Golden Land and never taken that seriously.